If you could go back in time and kill one person, who would it be?

Great Debates
1

Little bar discussion from this weekend. Wanted to get your thoughts. If you could go back in time and assassinate any SECULAR historical figure, who would it be, and why??

I was debating whether or not this goes in “Humble Opinion”, but I have a feeling this will become a debate really really quick!

Here’s the ground rules:

  1. It cannot be a religious figure. Sorry, but if I don’t enact that ground rule, within three posts some A-hole is going to post “Mohammed”, to which another crackpot will vote for Jesus Christ, because as we know, the Crusades, etc… This is not a religious argument.

  2. The historic consequences of your one kill must be taken into account. Perhaps the person you wipe out while evil, without them, maybe the world would NOT be a better place.

  3. The person must already be dead. I don’t want to advocate murder here! Therefore Osama-bin Laden is off the list, sorry (not that he would not be my first choice right now!!!).

  4. It has to be a famous historic figure. Sorry, “I would go back in time and kill my ex-husband” is of no consequence to us!

So . . who gets the bullet?

2

Do I have to?

3

Hmmm, are we speaking of killing someone before they’ve actually done something wrong? Don’t know if I could do that.

And if time is linear, then haven’t I technically already gone back in time and tried to kill them but for whatever reason failed, since they lived to do whatever evil thing they did?

And if time isn’t linear but is comprised of possibilities, then aren’t there some where I succeed and some where I fail and thus how does one know which timelines have benefited from my action? Perhaps I succeeded in one, but utterly failed in all the rest, and actually made things worse in 100 billion of them.

My head hurts.

4

Alfred the great. He brought civilized rule back to Britain after 500 years after the fall of the Roman empire, and opened the door to Henry Plantegenat to found the British imperial monarchy, and the Industrial Revolution and everything else.

Kill Alfred and there’s a good case that Imperial England never rises.

5

Which is a good thing because…?

6

No warm dark beer or soccer matches. More importantly we wipe out cricket in one fell swoop. :wink:

(actually I was just looking for the way to stir up the most trouble.)

7

Being selfish, I’d be uncomfortable choosing a historical target in case amending history somehow wipes me out of existence, creating all sorts of awkward paradoxes.

But, super_head, it’s no good talking about time linearity problems. I reckon that Vinnie Virginslayer has already perfected his time machine, and has been wiping out historical madmen for ages - obviously we have never heard of these people, as they have been removed from history. I expect Vinnie comes here after every killing, trying to get us to help him pick his next target. We, of course, have no knowledge of this.:slight_smile:

As for my answer, my first thought was obviously Hitler, but then I realised that he came to power because of the circumstances born out of World War I; if he hadn’t caused WWII, someone else would have done. So, best kill Kaiser Bill to prevent the first world war. But then again, if that Archduke hadn’t been shot in Sarajevo, maybe WWI wouldn’t have happened anyway - so, let’s eliminate the gunman. But, he was motivated by… and so on and on.

Even worse, if we drew a line sometime and said that we are only worried about history from a certain point on, killing one person could result in even worse alternatives. For example, Scylla, eliminate Imperial England, and instead you get France ruling the world (and look how they treat their colonies still).

Come to think of it, we would not only miss out on warm dark beer, but wiping out England’s history would mean that I couldn’t gloat to my German colleagues about the 5 - 1 football result…

If I was totally unselfish, I’d advise the time machine man to go back and find the first monkey to show off by walking on two legs and chase him back up his tree, thus eliminating all the problems we have caused since. Let the ants have the world, I say.

8

I’d probably have gotten Mao. Only Stalin rivalled him in number of victims. Stalin was necessary because despite all the evil things he did, he did beat Hitler. It’s too much of a gamble to entrust anybody else with that task. Stalin is the only one we know could do the job because he was the only one who did. I guess if he was murdered after Stalingrad, the risk would be less as I think Hitler’s fate was sealed by then. However, Stalin took the bulk of his victims before Stalingrad and so his dea th at this stage would be less beneficial than Mao’s.

Similarly, as ghoulish as it sounds, I think it would be risking too much to kill Hitler in WWI. He was probably the most important figure of the Twentieth Century and although his death would have prevented the deaths of tens of millions more, his life has affected billions in ways too unpredictable to speculate accurately about. e

9

Hmmm. That’s a contingency I had not calculated.

Clearly this tampering with space/time is more complicated than it at first seems.

10

Hard choice to make between FDR and LBJ. These two men did more to wreck the social fabric of America than any other human beings in history. The massive dependance on government, the welfare state,the “government knows best” attitutde so many people have in this country. Guess I have to go with FDR. Without the socialist ball he got rolling, Johnsons programs may never have seen light of day. I believe the government would play a much, much smaller role than it does now, taxes would be lower across the board, and there would be a greater sense of self reliance in this country. This country would be soooooooo much different/better had Rossevelt not been President.

My Dad used to tell me that in the 30’s and 40’s there was a joke where a man would walk to a news stand and look at the headlines of the newspaper. The news stand operator would ask him if he wanted to buy the paper. The man would say, “No, I’m only glancing at the obituaries.” The paperboy would then state that the obituaries weren’t on the front page. To which the man replies “Buddy, the sonofabitch I’m waiting for will be!”:stuck_out_tongue:

11

Aw, c’mon; can’t we kill Hitler? Please? Or we could just go back with a lot of contemporary German money, and bribe an art school to accept him as a student, keep him on, and let him graduate. Then, if he applies for a commercial art job, we bribe someone to hire him, and we set up a fund to keep sending the company a monthly check to cover his salary and a bit extra. Or if he tries to sell his art, we buy it.

We don’t really need to kill villians of the past; just interfear in their lives to head them off from from doing whatever bad stuff they did.

Re the choice of Hitler-- It would be nice to change the whole 20th century to eliminate WW1, WW2, and all the subsequent bad stuff. I’d accept the loss of the technological advances of wartime in order to save all those lives. But what one person could you eliminate that would accomplish this? Beats me. So, I’d settle for taking Hitler out in order to have a 20th century that does not include the concentration camps.

12

Adam… the world would be a more peaceful place now. Failing that…go for Eve.

13

So Adam’s out, Eve too.

14

Interesting arguments over Stalin and Mao . . see why I put this in Debates?

Forget those ass clowns. . . how about we travel back in time and kill the Commie snake by cutting off it’s head . . KARL MARX?

No murderous purges by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. No Cuban Missle Crisis. No VietNam War. Possibly none of the mess we have in Afghanistan because, no Soviet invasion. No broken up Soviet Union possibly leaking nuclear weapons into the hands of some ne’er do wells.

And no China with 1 billion people as a possible enemy of the US over Taiwan down the line.

Then again . . . maybe if it were NOT for these men, perhaps there could have been someone WORSE than the Communists?

Food for thought . . .

15

I’d take out the guy that invented the time machine.

16

President Smith? It would be an interesting counterfactual. I’d need more information to speculate on how things would change, though.

17

Ruling out Jesus from this discussion is probably a good idea. Knowing him he’d probably just rise again anyway…

Man, I crack me up.

18

What about Einstein??? I’ve heard his insights were true revelations in that nobody else may have thought of them for many, many years. We might have nukes today and the world be safer??

19

Well, I like Roosevelt, so I will have to go with his famous assassin’s father, PKBites, thus eliminating the birth of the famous assassin and presidential assassin wanna-be.

As for Stalin, he didn’t believe the many warnings he had about Hitler invading and was suckered by German tricks into wiping out his officer corps. Someone else, like say Kruschnev, might had done much better.

As for Hitler, the only reason we won that war was because the German General staff turned over every important decision to a psychotic corporal, who made one mistake after another. Germany was ripe for someone like Hitler. Goering was smart and trained enough that if it had been him at the head of the Nazi party, those still alive might all be speaking German.

I’ll go for Nostradamus. Nothing more irritating than to hear how this ancient wino’s pronouncements predict everything.

20

C’mon, Kill Marx? That’s a little like killing a religious figure. Just because some dinks decided to warp someone else’s idea for their own twisted purpose, that’s no reason for a death sentence. Seriously, I can tell by the amount of thought dedicated to consequences (yes, I know that was a stipulation) that nobody here could ‘change the world’ through some radical action like offing somebody. The people that affect history/future don’t generally seem to think about reprecussions. Can you honestly tell me that if the ‘Founding Fathers’ of America could see the Monster that they gave birth to in the name of freedom… I think Jefferson, at the very least, would shoot himself.
That said…
I think I’d erase Confucious, think about what you’d find in fortune cookies today…